Word: napoleonism
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Cosimo becomes famous. Voltaire inquires about him, and when Napoleon visits Ombrosa he chats with Cosimo, risking a stiff neck as he looks up to the treed man. Cosimo has adventures with bandits and pirates that Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would have been embarrassed to find in a movie script, and enjoys a love affair that is as notable for its acrobatics as for its passion. He is neither an outcast nor a misanthrope. In fact, he is a heroic do-gooder whose office just happens to be a forked tree...
Apart from Lowe's plaguy tactics. Napoleon's own skeleton court was a prickly lot. Three officers and a secretary-Marshal Bertrand, Count de Montholon, General Gourgaud, Count Las Cases-had accompanied him into exile out of mixed motives of avarice, reflected glory and-last and least-devotion. It was believed that Napoleon had 6,000,000 francs in Europe (he actually had half of that). Bertrand was perhaps the least self-seeking, but he lost status when Mme. Bertrand refused to become Napoleon's mistress. With or without the hint, Mme. de Montholon was a wily...
Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity's avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud's statement that if Las Cases tried...
Dinner and what followed were usually the most taxing of rituals. At 5 p.m., everyone assembled in the dining room at Longwood, Napoleon's home, officers in dress uniform, ladies in low-cut gowns. Napoleon bolted his food, and often ate with his hands. After dinner, there were games. If the game was chess, the officers had to stand throughout, and Napoleon almost invariably lost unless the other player sycophantically threw the game. At other times, Napoleon read aloud from Racine, Corneille and Moliere. Sometimes he held the little band spellbound with accounts of his great campaigns. After...
...last days on St. Helena had little romance. Defections and deportations had riddled his last command. He was in agony, either from stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but his doctors were too incompetent to diagnose his case. At dawn on May 5, 1821, with his mind wandering, Napoleon said, "Who retreats?", then: "At the head of the army." They were his last words...